Keywords: Create a business website, how to build a business website for small business, how to build a business website

How To Build A Business Website For Small Business 

Building a website for your business is not a luxury anymore. It is imperative to create a business website for your business. It is no longer possible to run a business without having an online presence. Whether you are a freelance writer, have an electronic store, or any other kind of small business, an informative and nice looking website is a must to grow your business. These days consumers use the internet for everything from product research, location, opening hours, etc.

Building a business website was a huge task some years ago. but not now, Website development software has gone a long way over the years. Website Design and development do not require coding knowledge now. Anybody with some technical knowledge can build a website of his own. You just need to follow some basic rules and tips for building a website. This article will tell you all the basic things you need to know to create a business website. Check out the best website development company in Bangladesh.

How much does it cost to build a website for a small business?

The cost of a website for small business depends on the functionality of that website. Besides, the price also varies company to company and country to country. If you make a website from Bangladesh costing of $200, the same website will cost you $1000 from USA, UK or Canada. Normally, for startups, a standard small business website development budget should be between $200 to $500 from Bangladesh and $700-$1200 from USA.

How can I create a small business website for free?

If you have some website development knowledge and experiences, you may try to develop your smalls business website for free. But, we think you should not do or expect a fully free website for your business. Because, most of the time, free website offers very limited services and in your website, the ads pop up when and then. It will damage your business reputation.

So, the minimum budget of a small business website should be for a domain, hosting, and a WordPress theme. The total cost may be around $100.

What Are The Steps To Build A Business Website For Small Business?

Before you start building your small business website, you need to know some things and homework you need to do. Without proper planning and adequate knowledge, it’s impossible to make a functional and user-friendly business website for your small business. Here are the steps you should know before you start building a website for your business.

What Is The Purpose Of Small Business Website?

The purpose of a business website is to provide general information about your business. If you sell products or services, then you should consider building an e-commerce website. Before starting building a website, it is essential to tell the users about your business. It would help if you told people about your business profile, your customers’ feedback, your team, or management. The home page should have contents that give users a detailed overview of your business.

The most important thing about a website is user experience. You may have set a fundamental goal, but that will not work if your users do not find it easily. You should have developed a primary goal and show that information so that users find that easily. Then you can reinforce other plans as they navigate. Before starting a website, you should ask yourself:

• What information do you want to share with your visitors about your business?
• What information do you want to take from your visitors?
• What actions do you want your visitors to take (e.g., Buy products, visit your physical store, ask for a quote, contact you to get the product)
• How will you display your service or products?
• Who are your clients, and what do they tell you about you?

If you are a retailer and service provider and want to sell online, you need an e-commerce website. An E-commerce website is a complex mechanism and needs some expert help. You will have to set up a payment option, mainly provided by some third-party software companies, to take your clients’ payments. Building an e-commerce website requires more investment than a business website.

Find A Good Domain Name That Suits Your Business 

A domain name is the entry point of your website, also known as the address of your website. That is the URL that you will share with your existing clients, potential clients, and on social media or emails. So, it should describe your business, and at the same time, the domain name should be easier to remember. It also should be SEO friendly as you want to show your domain at the top when people search for your business. Here are some primary rules you need to follow before picking up the domain name for your business.

• Easy to spell: Make it as simple as you can. Avoid using slang or complicated words.
• Keep the domain name short: The shorter your domain name, the easier for visitors to remember. Do not put the full business name into your domain. That can make the domain name bigger and hence less memorable.
• Choose your TLD (Top Level Domain): TLD or the top-level domain is the extension that we see at the end of every part. There are lots of TLDs for domains like .com, .org, .net. You can get business-specific TLDs like lawyer, pizza, photo. Usually, it would help if you went for a .com domain for your business. You can choose .org if you are planning to build a website for an NGO or charity organization. You can pick the country domain if you are planning to do business in a specific country. Business-specific domains are expensive. So, we do not recommend purchasing those at the beginning of your business. Sometimes you will notice the domain you are looking for gets already purchased by a person or company, and they will sell it for a higher price. DO not go for these domains if you do not want that domain badly, as this will cost a vast amount of money. Invest that money in building the website and digital marketing.
• Avoid numbers, hyphens, or dots: You can use numbers, hyphens, or dots in your domain, but we recommend you DO NOT. Make the domain name simple when people search for your store online. 
• Make it easy to remember: There are billions of websites on the internet. It is not easy to remember the name even users want to. So, try to select a domain name that is easy to remember. 
• Research the domain name: You can search for a domain name on any hosting provider’s website. Google domain is the easiest way to see if the domain is available or not. If you find the domain has already got taken, then you should find options. There are many online tools for finding domain names for your business. For example, you can research a domain name using Domain Wheel. For better understanding, we are adding a screenshot of the domain research. 

Choose A Hosting Provider With Good Tech Support

What is a website host? Why do you need a hosting provider? Every website needs a host to store all of its files and data. Hosting providers rent you the server to host your website. They also provide the necessary technology and services to run your website smoothly.

The hosting service price varies from 2 dollars to thousands of dollars per month, depending on the type of service you want. You may find some free hosting on the internet but never go for free hosting for your business. If you get confused and do not know anything about hosting technology, we have covered the topic.

We recommend you to take your web-hosting services from CheapHost. The CheapHost provides the best web hosting company in Bangladesh.

 Types Of Web Hosting Plans

• Shared hosting:  On shared hosting, you will share a server with other customers. The cost of shared hosting starts at 2 dollars a month. Though it is cheap and from the right hosting provider, you will get good technical support; but this plan is not great for business and entirely secure. The speed of your website may hamper this plan. As it is a shared server, there is a vulnerability when any other website hosted on the same server gets hacked. If you possess a small business and don’t have enough budget to spend on your website, you can now purchase this plan and update it later.
• Dedicated Server: Dedicated servers are expensive than shared servers, but you will get the server’s optimum output. In this plan, you will get a dedicated server for your business, which means you don’t have to share the resources with other customers. A dedicated server means you will get a full physical server for your business. All the resources are yours, and this is more secure than sharing your server with others. The price of this plan starts from around $100/month. This plan is expensive for any new small business owner. We do not recommend you to purchase this as a new or small business owner—purchase in when you have a highly functional website with a large traffic volume.
• VPS or Virtual private server: This is the best option for small to medium businesses to start their website. A VPS or Virtual Private Server is a single server that gets virtually partitioned into several servers. Hence, even though you share a single physical server virtually, you are getting a full dedicated server. This server won’t affect your website’s speed when other websites are busy, and the security you will get is higher than the shared server, or we can say equal to the dedicated server. The price of the VPS starts at 20 dollars a month.

There is another thing to consider before choosing a hosting provider. Your hosting provider must have

• Live chat and phone support: Ensure that your hosting provider’s approval is up to the mark. E-mail or ticket-based support is not good enough as this is a lengthy process. You need to solve any kind of issue with your website as fast as possible. Make sure you will get the proper support on time from your hosting provider.  

Here are some top hosting providers around the world:

• HostGator
• BlueHost
• GoDaddy
• InMotion
• SiteGround

Develop Your Contents

Contents are the most important elements of your website as the visitors will see the contents of your website first. Without making a great first impression, you can not convert a visitor into a client.

A good website is more than a static useful home page. You will have multiple pages dedicated to different services or aspects of your website. For example, if we say about a detailed catalog of your products or services. You should have an ‘About Us’ page where you will add the profile of your business. If you sell online, then you may add the purchase and refund policy. You should have a ‘contact us’ page where users will send you direct mail. You must add all of your contacts to your website. Here the list of works you must do before start building your website:

• LOGO: Logo is significant for any business. If you don’t have a logo, then design one. Do not prepare the logo using a free tool. Hire a designer and inform him or her about your business. Research some logos online doing similar business like you. Tell the designers about your choice. WebTech provides logo design services all over the world. You can contact them for the dream logo of your website.
• Write a clear description of your business: It is essential to let people know who you are and what you do just when they land on your website. Describe your business in a single line or two in your tagline. There is a section of your website called Hero Area where you place a banner or slider to display your products or services. Use one or two lines there to tell people about your business. Then make sure you have an ‘About Us’ page at the main menu or the footer of your website. Give a brief description of your business on that page. You can add some reviews from your existing clients and add them to the home page. If you provide services, then it is good to tell people about the team members. Add their social profile to the description. It is not easy to write all the contents yourself. We recommend you hire a copywriter to do the job for you. You can hire a freelancer, but we recommend hiring a company to write those contents for you. Web Tech delivers high-quality content for any website. You can contact them for your next project. 
• Place a CTA Button: CTA or Call To Action buttons are great to convert potential clients into customers. Create catchy and informative content and place a CTA button at the bottom of that content. Place the button strategically. After telling people about your business, place a ‘Contact US’ button. After telling your service you can add ‘Get a Quote,’ you can add ‘Buy Now’ on the product page. REMEMBER to put the appropriate button as this will convert your visitors into customers.
• Get high-resolution authentic pictures: There is a saying, “A picture tells a thousand words.” Everybody loves to see photos. Therefore you will need some attractive images for your website. Do not use any pictures downloaded from google. Copyright images will destroy your website. You can get stock images for free or purchase one. But we recommend you display actual photos of your company, clients, and team members. Take pictures of your products by hiring a freelance photographer. Images are vital to creating an impression. It is better to use actual photos rather than using any stock photos.

Choose the WordPress as Website Building Platform

There are many website builders in the market. You can choose a free CMS or content management system to develop your website like WordPress. You may also choose a custom website development solution. Some website development company like WebTech designs and develop custom CMS for small businesses. But, for startups, the open-source software or CMS is the best choice. The necessary software is free, you can purchase a theme or plugins at a low price, and every CMS has its large community to help you. Hiring a developer for a CMS is not very expensive. You can also hire a developer to build the website with row coding, but that is a lengthy process. You will have to depend entirely on the developer for future updates or additional functionality. Here is our suggestion for top website builders

WordPress: WordPress is the top & most popular CMS or website builder worldwide at the moment for all types of business, especially for small business websites. More than 30% of the websites on the internet are on WordPress. WordPress was initially a blogging platform, but now this CMS gets widely used for various purposes, from blog to e-commerce websites. WordPress is easy to install and easy to operate. There are too many reasons why you need to choose WordPress to create a website.

• WordPress is free
• Highly customizable
• Thousands of free themes and plugins
• Large market of paid themes and plugins at low price
• Available developers to build a theme or plugin
• SEO friendly
• Easy to manage
• Safe and secure

One thing you need to consider if you are using WordPress and that is its security. As WordPress is prevalent, hackers always target this platform. It would help if you took extra care of the security of your website. It is challenging to secure every single third-party plugin for WordPress, so keeping your website secure is an ongoing process. Check that every plugin you are using gets updated regularly. You must use plugins provided in the WordPress repository only. If you find any suspicious plugin, then do not hesitate to remove it.

Drupal: This is another popular CMS. You will get many features that are available in WordPress. Drupal is flexible and also has a large community to support. That is more secure than WordPress. The downside is Drupal does not have so many themes and plugins to add more functionality to your website.  

Joomla: This is another popular CMS like drupal. It has better SEO than Drupal. It is secure and has a more multilingual capability than WordPress.

Hosted Website Builders

Squarespace: Squarespace is a subscription-based service. You will have to purchase an annual or monthly subscription to use Squarespace. Building a website is a piece of cake using the drag and drops functionality of Squarespace. The service includes website design, development, software maintenance, metrics. You will also get a domain name with annual purchase, SSL security, 24/7 support, and unlimited bandwidth and storage hosting all in one package. That is the right solution if you are unwilling to hire a designer to build the site for you. The learning process of Squarespace is reasonably easy compared to WordPress or any other CMS. If you have some or no technical knowledge, Squarespace is a better option.

Wix: Wix is another website builder like Squarespace with a much easy user-friendly interface. You can build your website using Wix’s drag and drop feature. You will get more design options in Wix with many more templates. But the downside is Wix forces you to build the whole website when you choose a template. In Squarespace, you can change the template without rebuilding the entire website. Learning Wix is much easier than Squarespace. If you want a quick website, then Wix is the right solution.

There are other website builders you may find if you do a little bit of research. Hosting providers like Hostgator, GoDaddy has their website builders. Website builders can start a website without much tech knowledge. You don’t need to hire a developer to help you with additional functionality. But the downside is that you have to adjust with their available design and functions. Sometimes that can be a bit frustrating. Moreover, designing a website is no child’s play.

Do I Need An Expert?

Yes, you need an expert hand to help you through the process. So we highly recommend you hire a web design company to help you build the website for yourself. WebTech is one of the top website building companies. You can create a website using the desired technology and at a low price. You will get a well designed, highly functional website and excellent after-sale services.

Pick A Good E-Commerce Platform 

If you plan to sell your products or services online, you will need an e-commerce platform. There are lots of e-commerce software, but you have to choose wisely. Here is the list of top e-commerce platforms:

WooCommerce: This is the top e-commerce platform in the world.WooCommerce is open-source, so it is free to use, and it works with WordPress.You can turn your WordPress website by installing the WooCommerce plugin. WooCommerce is flexible and easy to use. The necessary software is free, and you can add more functionalities to your store with paid extensions. There are many paid extensions for WooCommerce to fulfill almost any requirement. You will find many free and paid themes for WooCommerce. There is a large community for WooCommerce, and you can build a custom plugin by hiring a developer to meet your specific needs.

Magento: This is another popular open-source software for e-commerce websites. Magento is the best software if we are talking about e-commerce only. You will get endless features and functionality in Magento. Many of these functionalities are unavailable in other e-commerce software. The downside is Magento is not an easy software to learn. You will need a developer to complete the website for you. Magento developers are more expensive than WooCommerce developers. Hence the cost of your website will be higher. We recommend you use Magento if you are planning on selling high-volume products online.

Shopify: This is a hosted solution like Squarespace or Wix. You will have to purchase a monthly subscription to use it. Shopify is the most popular hosted solution, and easy to build an e-commerce website without much technical knowledge. But Shopify can be expensive for small business owners. It is better to use Shopify if you have some existing clients.

Do I Need A Developer To Build An E-Commerce Website For A Small Business? 

Yes, you do. An E-commerce website is more technical than a regular website. Hence we recommend you choose the technology and hire a developer to build a website with that technology. WebTech builds e-commerce websites using WooCommerce and with premium themes. If you want a hosted solution, then Webtech also can do that for you. They have their own hosted solution developed with Laravel.

Create Engaging Pages

Now it’s time to build the pages of your website. For a standard small business website, the following pages are necessary:

• Home
• About Us
• Your products and services (Use Description with visually appealing images)
• Management team
• Terms and conditions
• Contact Us
• Privacy Policy
• Client list
• Testimonials (Try to get testimonials from your existing clients)
• Additional pages focusing on the products of your small business

There are some other things you should look after.

• Use your images
• Make sure the graphics get compressed
• Research competitors website and observe how they built the site
• Research your customers and find out what they want from your website. Make it easy for them to find
• Stay consistent with your color and design
• Display your information with google map integration so that people can find you easily
• Use Call To Action button

Test And Publish

Always stay connected with your developer. Before publishing the website, you should closely observe the design and the functionalities of your website. Use different browsers and different mobile phones to test your website. Sometimes websites look different and act differently in other browsers. These days most people visit websites using their cellphones. Use phones with varying screen sizes to make sure the website looks and functions alright on all devices.

Install the WebMaster tool or tell your developer to do that for you. Learn how to use Google analytics. You will observe your users, their behaviors and run campaigns using this platform. You can monitor page performance and determine why a particular page is successful or unsuccessful, seeing Google analytics reports. Analytics is the essential part that you have to handle. It would help if you learned to use it.

Before publishing the website, you should test the speed of the website. Page speed is the most crucial parameter for SEO. Here are some important feature of the webmaster tool

• Visitors of your website. You can filter them on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis.
• You can also see the live traffic.
• You can see the bounce rate. If a user leaves your website just by visiting one page, you can call that a bounce rate.
• You can see the average time spent on each page and the whole site.
• From which area you are getting the traffic
• Broken links
• Webpage download time on mobile and computer
• And many more

You will find many great videos on YouTube to learn Google analytics. It is easy to understand.

Invest On SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

You should have strong Search Engine Optimization tactics for your website. Without proper SEO tactics, your website will not be visible on Google or other search engine search. Create appropriate strategies and implement those. Things you should do

• Research keywords and provide quality articles using those keywords
• Publish fresh contents regularly
• Place internal and external linking while publishing contents
• Use optimized images
• NEVER upload a video to your site
• Always check the speed of your website for mobile and pc

Invest in Social media marketing

Social media marketing is significant for all businesses these days. If you are a small business owner, you should use this platform to get clients. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin will bring lots of traffic to your website. You can publish a paid campaign on those platforms. Social media imply that you can choose your potential customers precisely. You can select the area, age range, interests to whom the ad will be displayed. Publish new content on the website and share those on your social media account. Post new offers on social media, link your website with that offer. That will attract more users to your website. You should place the links of your social media on your website. Make the best use of social media marketing.

Make A Website Maintenance Plan

Like a physical brick-and-mortar store, every website needs to be monitored and maintained correctly. These are the steps you should follow to keep the website

• Update all the software regularly
• Take backups and store them in both the cloud and local storage
• Scan the website and look for any suspicious activity
• Use performance data to optimize the site
• Run the speed test regularly
• Allow visitors to comment on your website and give feedback

So, creating a business website for small businesses is not a very tough thing to do. But we always suggest you contact a web design company to build the website for you. You can instruct them and tell them how to make the website. WebTech is a famous website design company, and you can build a business website at a low price here. To know more about Webtech, please visit.